Re: Obsolete packages

["Kenneth Nielsen" <k nielsen81 gmail com>]

>  Hey everybody.
> This is sort of a late response to this discussion but I have been busy so
> it couldn't be before now. I share the concern of Djihed and I don't think
> that it is a good solution to rely on people probably knowing what not to
> touch. I think an "obsolete" or "nearly obsolete" release set would be a
> good solution for those modules whose progressive development (these may
> still release but only for bug fixing) has stopped because they have been
> replaced.
>  Regards Kenneth Nielsen

Would you be willing to maintain such a list?
I ask because maintaining such a list would probably be a lot of work,
and a lot of risk in stepping on some one's toes, by accidentally but
incorrectly listing some software as obsolete when in reality it is
not.

I see your point, especially about the toe stepping

The free software world is a divergent and inhomogeneous world -- some
software maintainers do releases every other week, while some only do
maintenance releases once a year or so. The latter does not mean that
those pieces of software are obsolete, only that they are (probably)
mature and currently in a low maintenance mode, which most often means
that bug fixes and translation updates are few and infrequent, but
still happen.

As Claude already said, we already have an official way of declaring a
module "dead": By moving it to the SVN Archive
(http://svn-archive.gnome.org/). If you suspect some module is really
dead (no maintainer or no new releases planned), please do some
research (and contact maintainers to get it confirmed), and then let
svnmaster gnome org know.

If it's not dead, it is not obsolete.

Yeah, but it's exactly those ones that are the problem. The ones that have in principle been replaced but are still kept around for bugfixes. Look, I'm not saying "It's broken, now go fix it", it's not like that at all. I was merely pointing out that it is a problem. The problem that arise from this is that, if the coordinater of a translation (however vigilant he may be ;) ) misses the fact that a certain module is no longer really used and lets a translator translate it, that translator maybe scared away if he finds out that his efforts have been in vain. I do however have another idea to how we can circumvent this problem, but that will be the topic of another e-mail ;)
 

I should add that all help with these kind of investigations are much
apprechiated -- more often than not, translators are the ones who
first discover that a particular module is dead, but still haven't
been reported and marked as dead by being moved to the SVN Archive.
The SVN admins are overworked and do not have the resources to do
these investigations, and much appreciate help with reporting this
kind of things, in order to keep SVN clean by moving the dead modules
to the archive.

But please do the homework first, by actually asking the maintainer if
it's dead or not first, before you report the module as being dead to
svnmaster gnome org. Please also attach some confirmation (e.g. mail
from maintainer saying the module is dead) when reporting a dead
module.

Thanks a bunch,

Will do.